GERMAN FILM FESTIVAL: Bollywood is, plainly, a cultural flavour of the moment in the wake of Danny Boyle’s breakout triumph with Slumdog Millionaire. The rhythms of Indian pop music are being sampled by hip-hop artists and pop groups, and any film that wants to suggest a feeling of transported ecstasy is using a song and dance sequence – Minnelli-via-Mumbai – choreographed to the perceived dictates of the industry’s melodramatic genre. See Gary Marshall’s Valentine’s Day for confirmation.
In the German-Swiss production Tandoori Love, which is screening nationally as part of the touring German Film Festival, Bollywood culture meets a stern, frowning foe: a rural Swiss enclave where bratwurst is pre-eminent and to suggest otherwise is heresy. The third feature from director Oliver Paulus, who co-write the screenplay with Stefan Hillebrand, is a light-hearted fairytale that never quite breathes in the rarefied Swiss mountain air as it tries to find some common ground between two distinct cultures.
Western films that use Indian culture generally view their appropriation as a comic touch, a splash of colour to lighten their narrative. In a way they want the clash to jar audience sensibilities. But it can also mean that characters aren’t exactly fleshed out, as happens with Rajah (Vijay Raaz), a gifted cook who finds himself in the midst of a Bollywood film shooting in the Swiss Alps to provide an exotic setting.
The production’s participants, however, are the usual cutouts, from the angry director ('more tears," he constantly demands) and pressured producer to the spoilt, manipulative star, Priya (Shweta Agarwal), who demands Rajah’s attention if for no other reason than she expects to receive it. But one sighting in the local supermarket of Sonja (Lavinia Wilson) and Rajah is smitten, declaring his love and bursting into song, launching a fantasy sequence in the produce aisle where trolleys are choreographed and shopper become dancers.
Vijay Raaz (Monsoon Wedding) is a touch too old to play boyish love, so the film settles for eccentric passion, but it never distinguishes why Rajah is so particularly smitten with Sonja and what they might share that breaches the vast differences between them. The de facto unifier is food, which here is photographed with luxurious richness that gives the glistening of fruit and the mingling of heat and vegetable a slow-motion sensuousness that could seduce any cooking show aficionado.
You see only a few brief instances of Rajah’s food winning over the intransigent locals, because the kitchen is more the setting for the odd triangle between the dedicated, solemn Rajah, the perplexed Sonja and her nominal fiancé, the nebbish Markus (Martin Schick), who is so intent on remaking the staid family restaurant that he hires Rajah without even considering that he’s already proposed to Sonja and is a rival for her affections..
Ultimately not a great deal is at stake, but there’s a pleasure in watching Swiss obduracy get swayed by Rajah’s smiling dedication to Sonja. The corny lines of the songs Priya sings during snatches of her at work come to actually personify Tandoori Love’s philosophy: 'Will my head be ready when loves crosses my path," asks one lyric, but it is Sonja, capably played by Lavinia Wilson, who has to answer that question. It makes for an awkward film, but it’s buoyed by an idiosyncratic outlook.
